Newswire

The prestigious Turner Prize shortlist has been announced, and true to precedent, provides plenty of fodder for the British tabloids. GIANT BUTT SCULPTURE UP FOR £25,000 ART PRIZE. RIDE A MODEL TRAIN AND CALL IT ART? But the four artists selected ,Michael Dean, Anthea Hamilton, Helen Marten, and Josephine Pryde, aren’t quite what we’ve come to expect from Britain’s highest-profile art circus. A lot of this work is dense, nuanced, and less overtly attention-grabbing than the butt cheeks would have us believe.

The prize won’t be awarded until December 2016, but in an effort to get out front of the nominations and award game, we’re debating the merit of these nominees today.

When an artist stops making work and attending shows, is there any chance the art world will remember them? No. For many, this just means one less artist to compete against for a grant application or open call.

Enter Residency For Artists on Hiatus (RFAOH), an organization dedicated to supporting artists who have put their practice on hold. During the course of the online residency, which lasts six months to a year, artists must produce a non-art project. Artists are then expected to maintain a blog on the residency’s website to not only reflect on and document the process, but examine what it means to suspend their art careers. (I wrote about the virtual residency program a few months ago.) Earlier this year, the residency was on hiatus itself: the project has largely been self-funded by co-directors Shinobu Akimoto and Matthew Evans, and they were awaiting news of institutional support. Last week, RFAOH announced their third open call for applications to its 2016/2017 programme, thanks to funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.

The Barnes Foundation is about to get a system-wide update. Best known for its collection of Impressionist, Post-impressionist and early modern paintings, the Foundation announced today that Shelley Bernstein will become their Deputy Director for Digital Initiatives and Chief Experience Officer. For 17 years, Bernstein has served as the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned Vice Director of Digital Engagement & Technology. She leaves that post May 16th.

Arts funding giant, Creative Capital, has a new President and Executive Director. Following a nationwide search, the Creative Capital board chose Susan Delvalle to succeed Ruby Lerner, Creative Capital’s founder and current President and Executive Director. Delvalle will start June 1st and becoming the organization’s second president in its 18 year history.

An important internet art archive will soon shutter. Turbulence.org, an online project that has commissioned new net art and networked hybrid artworks since the mid-1990s, announced over the weekend it would be going offline on December 31, 2016.

According to the announcement — made via a mass email to past and present artists, as well as in a public Facebook update — the organization can no longer sustain the operating costs needed to maintain its online archive.

We’ve been following NEW INC since it’s founding in 2014. An arm of the New Museum design to offer professional development opportunities to creatives in all fields, NEW INC offers a much-needed support model. Now, two years in and newly accepted applications for its September 2016-2017 term, how’s the non-profit doing?

“One thing that has been unique about NEW INC and incredibly important to our mission is that it’s not a one-size-fits-all community or approach to the idea of entrepreneurship,” says Julia Kaganskiy, NEW INC’s director, in an email interview with AFC. “We believe that even an individual artist or designer in the program is an entrepreneur — a business of one.”

Anti-surveillance activist Edward Snowden has teamed up with French New Age/trance producer Jean-Michel Jarre to create a music video. And it looks and sounds like a “hacking” montage from a bad, mid-2000s European C.S.I. knockoff.

If you’re wondering why this terrible, terrible thing exists, there’s a second, six-minute “making of” video to answer your questions with the help of even more over-used Final Cut effects.

North Carolina’s new discriminatory restroom laws are making waves beyond the music and entertainment industry. This month, Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen cancelled concerts in protest of the new anti-LGBTQ law, House Bill 2 (HB2), which requires transgendered people to use public bathrooms that align with their birth genders and invalidates the local ordinances protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination. The aforementioned rockers are just a short list of entertainers and big businesses taking their business elsewhere. Others, such as Cyndi Lauper and English band Mumford & Sons, have turned their North Carolina performances into benefits to raise money and awareness against the law. Moogfest, a music, art and technology festival, which takes place in Durham, has issued a statement protesting the law—though the festival will run regardless.

Now the art world has its own A-lister protesting the law. Eric Shiner, the Director of the Warhol Museum, has rescinded his acceptance to visit UNC-Chapel Hill in response to HB2.

Any art student might remember the adage “fat over lean” as a caveat about mixing mediums when building up surfaces. “Fat” refers to the gooey or translucent mediums used to bulk-up paint. “Lean” refers to the purer foundation of pigment a painting must be built upon. Many probably thought, “what’s the worst that could happen to a painting that fails to follow these rules, beyond mere cracking?” Apparently, jail time.

Less than three weeks before the April 30th opening of Odd Nerdrum’s show at Manhattan’sBooth Gallery, director and curator Casey Gleghorn received an email from one of Nerdrum’s sons announcing the unexpected. The 72 year old Norwegian painter, expected to fly in for his first American solo show in five years, could no longer attend the opening because he was going to jail to serve a one year sentence for tax fraud.

It’s not often a Canadian artist is featured in the business section of Canada’s top national paper, the Globe and Mail — especially in an advertorial promoting investment in exchange traded funds (ETFs).

ETFs are like mutual funds: so-called “baskets of securities” that enable you to diversify your holdings. The Financial Timeshas called ETFs the “phenomenon of the moment”: they are more “liquid” than mutual funds, and also cheaper, because they are tied to an index, making them ideal for beginner investors — like artists.

In this context, then, it might not seem so unusual that An Te Lu would be profiled in a printed half-page of “sponsored content” discussing his ETF-based portfolio.